M. Night Shyamalan’s OLD will also make you feel like you’ve aged a lifetime

M. Night Shyamalan has been riling audiences up for decades now. Dating back to his breakout, 1999’s The Sixth Sense, audiences have both marvelled and debated his twist endings and sometimes incredibly convenient narrative choices (we can argue about Signs later). While Shyamalan’s box office and critical success have ebbed and flowed over the years, his commitment to Big Idea genre filmmaking is like a line drawn in the sand — he’s going to keep making these movies no matter what people have to say about them.

His latest, Old, is a dark horror tale about a mysterious beach that causes people to age at a terrifying rate and seems primed to reignite the debates about Shyamalan’s work once again.

The premise of Old is fairly straightforward; a group of people at a luxurious resort are offered the chance to unwind at a secluded private beach near the hotel. However, once they arrive, they begin aging incredibly quickly, aging years in mere hours. With no means to escape the beach, the disparate group of vacationers desperately tries to understand what’s happening to them and find a way off the beach before they inexplicably die of old age.

Old is a difficult film to discuss without delving into spoilers — it’s not even that the film packs that many left-turns, but the fun of a movie like this is watching how Shyamalan keeps upping the tension while slowly peeling back the layers of the mystery. Set mostly in a single picturesque location, Shyamalan gets creative and busy with the camera to keep things interesting, but the sprawling international cast (including Gael García Bernal, Vicky Krieps, Eliza Scanlen, and Ken Leung, and Nikki Amuka-Bird) does him absolutely no favours here.

To be fair, they aren’t given that much to work with. The script feels like it was written by an AI program that simply has the characters regurgitating their jobs and minor trivia about their lives (yes, someone does state, “I am from Philadelphia,” so we know this is really an M. Night joint). As the more out-there moments begin creeping in, the robot-like nature of the characters becomes even more pronounced; maybe they’re supposed to be traumatized, but the blank facial expression on nearly every character’s face almost feels like there was initially a very different surprise reveal planned for the film.

While the premise is intriguing, the oddly stiff dialogue and almost universally bad ensemble cast acting (Alex Wolff and Thomasin McKenzie seem like the only humans in this movie) brings down what could have been one of the most exciting and unexpected films Shyamalan has delivered in years. There’s still some fun to be had with Old, and it’s probably best experienced in a packed theatre where the unexpected turns can be experienced with an equally bewildered crowd. The makeup work is really impressive, and Shyamalan deploys some fun camera tricky in some of the earlier aging sequences that feels like a Twilight Zone riff on Richard Linklater’s Boyhood. Ultimately though, Old is like a mirage on the beach; eventually, you realize there’s just nothing there.

Old is in theatres now.